My Top 1000 Songs #553: Kill Your Sons

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Lou Reed's solo career was incredibly frustrating... some great albums, a lot of fine songs, but also the need to sift through some material that ranged from mediocre to simply bland. And every now and then you'd get a killer track like "Kill Your Sons," off 1974's Sally Can't Dance (one of his more commercially successful outings but dismissed by critics and reviled by Lou himself). I'm kinda lukewarm on the album, but the song, a stomping riff-rocker detailing Reed's childhood family life and bouts of electro-shock therapy with harrowing and nasty straightforwardness, is one of his more overt throwbacks to the Velvet Underground days. Yeah, it's a little slow & turgid with strangely flighty guitar-hero riffing, yet it's a rare moment that makes you say, damn, wish he made more songs like this! 

"Mom called me on the phone, she didn't know what to do about dad. He took an axe and broke the table, aren't you glad you're married?"

Live 1984:

Power pop/jangle pop legend Tommy Keene gave it a brighter sheen on his terrific 1986 LP Songs From The Film (which, frankly, I prefer to the original; it's pretty definitive).